camera16
Mauro D'Agati. Alamar
Curated by Carlo Madesani
16th November h. 6.30 p.m
17.11.2011 - 28.01.2012
Tuesday-Saturday from 3.00 p.m to 7.00 p.m
Camera16, via Pisacane 16, Milano
Alamar is a working class discrict. It spreads to east of Havana. The town was thought in a new area by the working class who lived there around the 70’es and it was built as a “model town”: a project of a communist family in the future. Just ten years later this “utopia” failed. Now Alamar is an expression of deaft , a set between reality and dream. Mauro D’Agati (Palermo 1968) takes a look on this urban blight, very far from the idea of people have of Cuba. His research is mostly anthropological, he prefers more details and a pursuit of something more complicated like religion and culture. The sites represented aren’t far from those of other suburbs in the world where every day people struggle to survive because they live in extreme poverty and the difficulty of entering in economic system. Nobody can understand and explain why Alamar stopped to be avanguard and it degenerated in the chaos. Alamar and also Cuba aren’t more symbols of the socialist ideology but places where the “uncertainty” has erased the possibility of changement developing in a habit. The photographiesof Mauro D’Agati testify and tell a real present, a virtual past and a spectral future. However, Alamar doesn’t lose its special spirit because it isn’t crystallized in its utopia and it represents an only moment in the history of Cuba. “His camera has immediately become an extension of his senses thanks to a detached sensibility that it concurred to see, to smell, to feel, to listen to people, places, parks and roads, threes, animals and subjects. Full images of senses and colours are emerged from organic integration between machines and life,aesthetic and life. They’re not used in order to hide or to embellish here the truth, but for mitigate an excess of realism that it would scarry us.”
